The first series of the Inter-Institutional Roadshow seminars will be hosted at the British University in Dubai on the 5th of December. The programme will be issued very soon. I will be presenting the first plenary session and below I attach my abstract:

Classroom communication: moving from macro to micro analysis

Culture and language appear to be inextricably intertwined in a complex relationship. Cross-cultural communication (CCC) and intercultural communication (ICC) is arguably the subfield of pragmatics that has become an essential 21st century skill, especially in culturally and linguistically diverse settings. CCC is concerned with verbal and non-verbal communication across cultures, while ICC refers to identity and intergroup communication. Educational research has also sought to identify whether competence in CCC and ICC can be taught and learned in instructed contexts. Though no one would dispute that meeting student needs is central to the work of educators, there are few studies that consider the role of teacher identity on classroom pragmatic development. In order to better understand the pedagogical implications of teacher identity it is a prerequisite to shift our focus from sociolect (i.e. speech behaviour at societal level) to idiolect (i.e. individual speech behaviour at micro-level). In light of this information, this session will present the idiolect of 9 language teachers in the UAE and attempt to address the following questions: 1) what are the symmetries and asymmetries of each individual’s linguistic repertoire? 2) how does one’s idiolect shape their CCC and ICC competence and how is this translated to their classroom practice? The findings will be interpreted within an ethnolinguistic framework.